Guest Editorial: Incubators and Accelerators: Integrating Evolving Incubator Models and Learning from the Past

Abstract

The papers in this special section focus on the ability to integrate evolving incubator models into the organization. Management and organizational science focusing on the complex process of R&D that leads to the subsequent commercialization has come a long way since the days of post-World War II industrial and research laboratories. In this context, the evolution of the incubator can be retraced from the foundational research in the 1950s and 1960s of Researchon-Research—that explored the R&D process in a number of settings to derive and test theories of organization behavior. Since then, we have seen a concentration of research and practice that have spanned a burgeoning range of incubators models and entities that, in some manner, exist to play a role to support and harness new technology-based start-ups. For more than half a century, these third-party entities in the entrepreneurial ecosystem have spread from the United States to Europe and are a well-established worldwide phenomenon. Business incubators have been largely viewed as an essential means to facilitating the process of knowledge transfer and tech-based commercialization through the provision of office infrastructure, laboratories and equipment, business support services, mentoring, and access to entrepreneurial finance and specialist networks for the founders of these embryonic start-ups.